The computer industry continuously strives to offer improved computer systems at lower costs in today's environment of the "never satisfied customer". The history of the personal computer, or PC, is largely defined by periods of punctuated evolution where the introduction of a newer, more powerful PC design rapidly obsoletes another recent though earlier PC version or generation. In these regards, simplicity in computer system use, reduction in computer hardware costs and decreases in run-time electrical power consumption are all three meaningful areas of improvement and offer potentials of competitive advantage in the computer marketplace.
For their part, the software developers of the computer industry have fairly continuously striven to develop significantly more powerful and elegant operating systems and software utilities whereby the burden of functional complexity of the computer system is relieved from the computer system hardware and is accepted by the computer system software.
In particular, certain PC software operating systems, such as Microsoft's NT 5.0 and Windows 98, and Apple's OS 8.0, substantively incorporate and/or conform to individual principles, concepts and/or specifications found in the Human Interface Device standard, as described in "The Device Class Definition for Human Interface Devices, Firmware Specification", Version 1.0--Final, USB Implementer's Forum, 1997. The Human Interface Devices standard, or HID, teaches that certain host computers and PC's may be programmed to accept and/or transmit formatted self-descriptive information packets, or HID report descriptors, and peripheral state data, or HID reports, to and/or from HID compliant peripheral input, output and bi-directional devices. The use of predetermined formats for communication and control between the host computer and the peripheral devices is supports the vigorous commercial and consumer implementation of plug-and-play computer system modules, whereby a computer user may purchase a HID device with a high degree of confidence that the newly acquired HID device will be easily integrated into his or her computing system.
Many recent conventional art, multi-user PC game system designs include a communications traffic hub circuit, or hub, connected to a host PC via a Universal Serial Bus, or USB. The hub may in turn be in communication with up to 126 HID peripherals. Each HID device includes a dedicated micro controller in combination with an input, an output or a bi-directional device. Typical prior art designs provide HID compliant input devices by combining the micro controller circuit with a simple peripheral device, such as a joystick or a lamp. The micro controller circuit is specifically designed to generate HID report descriptors and HID reports formatted in accordance with the HID formatting that corresponds to the peripheral device, wherein the HID report descriptor may inform a HID compliant host computer about the type and internal features of the relevant input, output or bi-directional device via HID report descriptors. Additionally, data reporting the instantaneous state, or desired state, of the peripheral device is communicated to and/from the micro controller and the host PC by means of preformatted HID reports.
Conventional art teaches that each peripheral device requires a micro-controller circuit to interface the peripheral to the hub. Yet this interface design method is costly in hardware and has uneconomical electrical power requirements. The potential advantages of relying solely upon 0.5 Amp power transmission capability of the Universal Serial Bus standard in certain PC game arcade systems is reduced in the prior art systems that require more than four HID devices. Furthermore, the prior art fails to more fully exploit the opportunity for hardware cost reduction made possible by the increasing sophistication and capabilities of conventional computer operating systems, such as Windows 98 or NT 5.0.
Computer arcade game systems could be made more effective by the cost-effective inclusion of several additional computer system operational features, such as (1) allowing a low-cost HID device to provide alphanumeric character transmission to the host computer by software emulation of a keyboard, (2) insuring that a particular game software will run only with, or run optimally only with, particular HID devices, where the HID devices are identified by a serial number or a software key, (3) storing a credit counter in defense against losing game credits during a game system malfunction, and (4) providing a watchdog function that resets the host PC when a host PC crash or malfunction is empirically indicated.
There is, therefore, a long felt need to increase the energy efficiency, and reduce the cost and complexity of computer interface hardware designs that incorporate multiple input, output and/or bidirectional peripheral devices.